Solidarity from coast to coast

IN DOZENS of state capitals and cities across the country, workers from both the private and public sector, political activists, students and community members organized rallies to demonstrate their support for the struggle against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and his union-busting attack.

The outpourings of support--from Los Angeles to New York City, and from Boise, Idaho, to Miami--showed how fed up people are around the country with the politicians' pro-corporate, anti-worker agenda, and how much they sense the importance of the fight in Wisconsin.

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U.S. needs its own democracy movement

The Egyptians want to establish a viable democracy, and that’s a long, hard road. Americans are in the mind-bogglingly self-destructive process of letting a real democracy slip away.

I had lunch with the historian Howard Zinn just a few weeks before he died in January 2010. He was chagrined about the state of affairs in the U.S. but not at all daunted. “If there is going to be change,” he said, “real change, it will have to work its way from the bottom up, from the people themselves.”

I thought of that as I watched the coverage of the ecstatic celebrations in the streets of Cairo.

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Egypt, Jordan, and the Arab world's 'watershed' moment

(CNN) -- The protests that have spread through parts of the Arab world led to dramatic change in another country Tuesday, as Jordan's king dismissed his government.

King Abdullah II made the decision following protests in recent weeks in which several thousand people demanded economic and political reforms.

Experts on the region said Tuesday Abdullah's decision was aimed at warding off larger-scale demonstrations in the wake of the huge protests in Tunisia and Egypt. The Tunisia protests, which began the movement, toppled that country's government. In Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak has fired his Cabinet, but protesters in massive demonstrations continue to call for his ouster.

The protests -- which have also caught on to various extents in Algeria, Yemen, and Sudan -- have proved to be "a real watershed event for the Arab world," said Blake Hounshell, managing editor of Foreign Policy magazine. "It's really unprecedented."

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Sci-Fi To Fact: Planet Hunters Find Worlds Like Earth

As recently as 20 years ago, no one knew if planets outside our solar system existed. But now we know of more than 500. The biggest astronomy headlines in 2010 came from the quest for planets far outside our solar system that are similar to Earth.

Here

Archive Gallery: PopSci's Most Fantastic Space Colonies

Let's face it, sometime within the next century or so, overpopulation, the exhaustion of natural resources, an alien invasion -- or perhaps the optimistic spirit of adventure -- will force us to leave Earth in search of a new habitat. Earlier this week, NASA and DARPA announced a preliminary "Hundred-Year Starship" program for sending pioneers on permanent missions to Mars. To many, relocation from Earth sounds like a glorified exile, but some retro-futuristic eye candy from the Popular Science archives will surely change their minds.

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So called "Progressives" don't get it

The idiots at Crooks and Liars claim to hate republicans and conservatives, yet day after day they refer to the rethugs as the GOP! I could scream, this is beltway talk and it goes against everything they claim to stand for as a beltway critics. I will never use this offensive term because I don't kiss anyone's ass and do not believe they are the grand ole party, to say that as a left leaning person is stupid, always was, always will be. Will people wisen up? I don't have much hope for this ass kissing nation brainwashed by an omnipresent, greedy, relentless corporate media that represents the rich over everyone else. If a site, any site, that claims to be for the people, unbiased, and independent uses the Village line g.o.p., that instantly sends up a red flag that it is lying and is indeed speaking by and for the D.C. beltway village in concern troll fashion.

Democracy has been perverted by capitalism.

Democracy in practice only benefits the upper class, the lower class is not ignorant to their status and knowingly participates in their own subjugation. It's really quite remarkable, and even with this knowledge the middle and working classes don't seek a better life alternative. History will show how the idea of being fair, democracy, was intentionally used by the rich unfairly for decades until a point of enlightenment for society. Unfortunately we are still in the murky age of deception, enlightenment is within reach as the stinking rich reach with ever more greed which will no doubt backfire on them altering democracy, society, and equality for the better. Democracy needs to work for everyone, for this to work right capitalism must be phased out.

92% of Americans prefer Swedish style Democracy

The respondents were presented with unlabeled pie charts representing the wealth distributions of the U.S., where the richest 20 percent controlled about 84 percent of wealth, and Sweden, where the top 20 percent only controlled 36 percent of wealth. Without knowing which country they were picking, 92 percent of respondents said they'd rather live in a country with Sweden's wealth distribution.

As the new Forbes billionaires list, released Wednesday, testifies, the richest Americans are getting richer, even as the country as a whole gets poorer. After 2005 income inequality continued to balloon.

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The Progressive Politics of Happiness

Here of some examples of the kind of policies we should promote:

Paid family leave. Only the United States, Swaziland, Liberia and Papua New Guinea don’t guarantee at least paid maternity leave. Most wealthy countries also offer paid leave for fathers.

Paid sick days. Only a handful of desperately poor countries and the United States, don’t guaranteed paid leave when you’re sick. 86 percent of food service workers get no paid sick days and they come to work sick and get you sick—they can be fired if they don’t.

Paid vacation time. Only the United States, Guyana, Suriname, Nepal and Burma don’t guarantee at least some paid vacation time. Every European gets at least four weeks off with pay a year. We should support the Paid Vacation Act of 2009, sponsored in Congress by a true progressive, Representative Alan Grayson of Florida. It’s a very modest proposal, but a step in the right direction.

Here’s another idea: the choice of shorter work-time. In the Netherlands and some other European countries, workers have a legal right to reduce their hours without losing their jobs. They keep the same hourly pay, pro-rated benefits and full health care. This is an enormous expansion of personal freedom—the right to choose time over money, to select shorter hours of work without losing one’s livelihood.

Each of these policy reforms is essential to good health. Indeed, our lack of these rights is part of the reason Americans have the worst health in the industrial world, despite paying twice as much as everyone else does for healthcare. We are almost twice as likely to suffer chronic illness in old age as Europeans are, for example. Workplace stress in America is a killer, the “new tobacco” in the words of one cardiologist.

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Fake Mars Mission: 'Real World' Meets Space Travel

A fake mission to Mars is getting under way at a research institute in Moscow, where six men will spend the next year and a half inside a mock spaceship.

The international "crew" includes two men from Europe, one from China and three from Russia. They'll spend the next 520 days living inside just a few bus-sized modules at Russia's Institute for Biomedical Problems.

The team will have to put up with endless astronaut food, the grind of exercise and maintenance work, science experiments, fake emergencies — plus extreme isolation from the outside world.

"We get to see what happens to them over the course of an awful long time, and that's not been done before," says Nick Kanas, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco who worked on a 105-day pilot study leading up to this new Mars simulation.

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No Longer a fan of Rachel Maddow!

Tonight I tuned into her show, which I rarely do anymore since she became a mouthpiece for republican jerks using her to spread their talking points. Tonight was the last straw. There is a ridiculously stupid saying in liberal blog land, iokiyr, which mean these weak kneed "liberals" and "progressives" believe the thugs can do as they please with impunity. Retarded, that's putting it mildly. How can you be an opposition party and believe such a counterproductive thing? To add insult to injury Maddow said, "iokiyr always and forever" I was boiling mad, and refuse to watch her show again. It's never okay, forever we must fight them, prove them wrong. Always. Sadly the transformation to corporate drone is now complete. Only Keith Olbermann still defends progressive values, although that is will no doubt change if MSNBC happens to read this post. Americans better wake up to the media monopolies who now brainwash them on all stations at all times, radio and the printed press are not better and sometimes much worse. God bless America and the independent thinkers that made her great.

War Is Making You Poor Act

Today, Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) introduced bipartisan legislation called the “War Is Making You Poor Act,” which aims to call attention to a) how much money is being spent to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and b) how budget gimmicks are used to pay for them. Grayson’s legislation would slash the $159 billion request for supplemental war funding and use that money to deliver a tax break for all Americans. Grayson demands the Pentagon use its currently existing $549 billion defense budget to fight the wars. Speaking on the House floor today, Grayson underscored that the point of his legislation is to highlight the costs of the wars:

http://www.buzzflash.net/story.php?id=1098067

Future of the Car: The Electric-Car Cheat Sheet

In the past three years, the thought of companies like Chevrolet and Nissan selling lithium-ion-powered cars has gone from laughable to old news. Late this year, the plug-in Chevy Volt and pure-electric Nissan Leaf arrive. Carmakers from Ford to Toyota will follow in 2011 and 2012 with new electrified models of their own. In the beginning, the electric-car revolution probably won’t seem so revolutionary: a few thousand cars here and there. As long as automakers and battery companies keep pushing technology forward, however—by scaling up production and developing more-powerful ways to store electricity and power a car with it—the future for cars that plug into the wall will continue to brighten. Here’s where this emerging industry stands today.

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ParEcon Questions & Answers

If not capitalism, if not socialism, if not anarchism, if not Green economics, if not Solidarity economics, then what?

Our answer is participatory economics or, for short, parecon.

We mean for participatory economics or parecon to transcend capitalism, to implement the best socialist values, to transcend what have been socialist institutions, to achieve anarchist aspirations, to be green, to promote solidarity, and to accomplish production, consumption, and allocation in a truly classless way.

We do not mean participatory economics to be a blueprint. It is not and could not be and should not be a detailed map of a better economy.

We mean for participatory economics to be a description of a new economy's institutions. We mean for participatory economics to be a description of the central features a desirable new economy will need to have to be both viable and worthy.

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96-0: Fed Audit Passes Senate

Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), the Federal Reserve's most outspoken defender, came out in support of an amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to force transparency on the Federal Reserve. Gregg's surprising support gives the amendment a major boost.

The Sanders amendment began as a reflection of language passed by the House and cosponsored by Reps. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) that would authorize a broad audit of the Fed. In negotiations with Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and officials from the Fed, Sanders scaled back his audit and restricted it to a one-time look at lending activity from December 1, 2007 until the present -- information that the Fed has so far fought to keep from disclosing. It goes further in some respects than the Paul-Grayson measure, in that it mandates the disclosure of recipients of Fed largesse. (Background on the compromise here.)

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New Software Can Hire, Evaluate, and Pay Workers, Making Human Bosses Obsolete

Anyone looking for work these days knows how hard it is to get your resume into the hands of a human. Fortunately, perhaps, it may soon be possible to get hired without that step.

Freelancer.com, an Australian jobs site, is using software algorithms that allow computers to automatically recruit, hire and pay workers to do a wide range of tasks, New Scientist reports.

"Software can now simply post a job and hire one, three, or 500 humans; software can now literally assemble an army overnight to solve complex problems," says Matt Barrie, Freelancer.com's CEO, in a press release.

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Graphene is Next

The Substance Found in Pencils will Speed Up our Computers One Thousand Fold

Graphene. If you’ve never heard about it, don’t worry, a lot of people haven’t, because it’s really only been “discovered” relatively recently, and most of the truly interesting news about it has been in the last year. The amazing thing is that we’ve actually been using it for centuries, in the form of the common pencil. Graphene is a form of carbon, much like carbon nanotubes and other fullerenes, with one major difference. While fullerenes are 3D structures of carbon atoms, graphene is a flat sheet. It’s a 2D lattice of carbon with bonds as strong as diamond. It’s this sheetlike nature that makes it so useful in a pencil. As you write, individual planes of graphite are sheared off the end and deposited on the paper. Those individual planes are pure graphene.

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Obama Seeks To Stabilize A Risky Business

Obama's insistence on addressing derivatives — and the sense shared by lobbyists on all sides of the issue that derivatives will inevitably fall under greater scrutiny of some kind — represents a remarkable turnaround.

A dozen years ago, President Bill Clinton, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Congress all opposed government oversight of derivatives. A law enacted in 2000 made it clear that most derivatives could not be regulated. Derivatives serve a legitimate purpose in hedging risks and there was concern at the time that imposing too much regulation would put the U.S. out of line in what is truly a globalized market.

Some of those worries remain valid. Still, the former consensus against regulation has flipped around almost entirely. Derivatives are widely viewed as a key contributor to the near-collapse of the financial markets in 2008. It's clear that any financial overhaul bill that clears Congress this year will impose new restrictions on derivatives trading.

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Graceful Decline

Full piece is here

The end of Pax Americana

The epoch of American dominance is drawing to a close, and international politics is entering a period of transition: no longer unipolar but not yet fully multipolar. President Barack Obama’s November 2009 trip to China provided both substantive and emblematic evidence of the shift. As the Financial Times observed, “Coming at a moment when Chinese prestige is growing and the U.S. is facing enormous difficulties, Mr. Obama’s trip has symbolized the advent of a more multi-polar world where U.S. leadership has to co-exist with several rising powers, most notably China.” In the same Pew study, 44 percent of Americans polled said that China was the leading economic power; just 27 percent chose the United States.

Bankrupt Empire

The United States government is effectively bankrupt. Washington no longer can afford to micromanage the world. International social engineering is a dubious venture under the best of circumstances. It is folly to attempt while drowning in red ink.

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NASA to Launch Robonaut This Year

Later this year, NASA's R2 will become the first humanoid robot resident of the International Space Station. The launch of the handsome android, which until now had not been firmly scheduled, has now been fast-tracked to happen this September.

Before the bot goes up, it has to be tested in conditions of vacuum, low gravity, high radiation, and trained sensitivity to the unusual practices on board the ISS.

NASA has released a new video showing off R2's impressive capabilities.

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GM viruses offer hope of future where energy is unlimited

Breakthrough as US Researchers Replicate Photosynthesis in Laboratory

Scientists have made a fundamental breakthrough in their attempts to replicate photosynthesis - the ability of plants to harvest the power of sunlight - in the hope of making unlimited amounts of "green" energy from water and sunlight alone.

The researchers have assembled genetically modified viruses into wire-like structures that are able to use the energy of the sun to split water molecules into their constitute parts of oxygen and hydrogen, which can then be used as a source of chemical energy.

If the process can be scaled up and made more efficient, it promises to produce unlimited quantities of hydrogen fuel, a clean source of energy that can be used to generate electricity as well as acting as a portable, carbon-free fuel for cars and other vehicles.

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Nine Myths About Socialism in the US

Myth #1. The US government is involved in class warfare attacking the rich to lift up the poor.

There is a class war going on all right. But it is the rich against the rest of us and the rich are winning. The gap between the rich and everyone else is wider in the US than any of the 30 other countries surveyed. In fact, the top 10% in the US have a higher annual income than any other country. And the poorest 10% in the US are below the average of the other OECD countries. The rich in the U.S. have been rapidly leaving the middle class and poor behind since the 1980s.

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Geminoid F: Hiroshi Ishiguro Unveils New Smiling Female Android

eminoid F, a copy of a woman in her 20s with long dark hair, exhibits facial expressions more naturally than previous androids

Japanese roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro unveiled today his latest creation: a female android called Geminoid F. The new robot, a copy of a woman in her 20s with long dark hair, can laugh, smile, and exhibit other facial expressions more naturally than Ishiguro's previous androids.

Ishiguro, a professor at Osaka University, is famous for creating a robot replica of himself, the Geminoid HI-1, a teleoperated android that he controls remotely. The new Geminoid F ("F" stands for female) is also designed to be remote controlled by an operator.

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Inducing 'Plasticity' in Brain, Allowing it to Rewire Itself Like New

The brain is the body's most complicated biological machine, and as such it can be very difficult to service when something goes wrong; after our neural wiring is put in place, at a very young age, altering or rebuilding it becomes extremely challenging. But researchers at UC San Francisco have figured out a way to induce a new period of "plasticity" -- a state in which neural circuitry is receptive to change -- in the visual cortices of mice, a breakthrough that could lead to treatments for brain circuits damaged by developmental problems or traumas.

All regions of the brain go through periods of high plasticity at various times in the development process during early life. During this time, neurons are highly responsive to signals -- in the case of the visual cortex, visual signals -- that shape the way they will function going forward. Through a process known as synaptic transmission, the cells rapidly relay signals from one appropriate cell to the next, creating the neural circuitry that enables functions like vision.

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